Against the Current: Sita and Her Foils in - Bad Request

characters seem to leap across the centuries into the present. Chalam’s dialogue is
particularly gripping in “Sita Enters the Fire” (Agni Pravesham), a brief piece written ca.
1935. 18 In it, Chalam imagines a conversation between Rama and Sita as they meet for
the first time since her imprisonment in Lanka. When they begin to speak, Sita expresses
her joy at seeing her husband again but by the end, Sita has become so disillusioned that
she throws herself into Ravana’s funeral pyre. In contemporizing Sita, Chalam gives her
words that free her from the constraining semantics of dharmashastra.
Many critics have objected to Sita’s acquiescence when Rama mistreated her. For
example, Bina Agarwal’s English poem “Sita Speak,” which appeared in Indian Express,
refers to several key moments at which Sita remained mute, and then asks “[H]ow did
they silence you?” 19 Such questions appear in regional language writing as well as in
English. For example, each stanza in award-winning Kannada writer Vijaya Dabbe’s
poem ends with “Sita, why didn’t you speak?” 20 Yet back in 1924, Chalam had already
furnished Sita with words that enabled her to contest Rama’s patriarchal arguments.
In “Sita Enters the Fire,” an example of such terminology appears in a rapid-fire
set of exchanges prompted by Rama’s refusal to accept Sita back because some of his
citizens suspect her sexual purity because she lived within the precincts of Ravana’s
household. Sita, who abandoned the comforts of the palace to accompany Rama into
exile, asks him to renounce his kingdom so he need not conform to such public opinion.
Their exchange rests upon a tug of war over “rights” (hakku, plural hakkulu):
Ramu: My dharma is to be king. And it is my hakku.
Sita: You have dharma and hakkulu. But what about me? You have the hakku to
claim me and to reject me. Why don’t you give up your hakku for my good?
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